Dear Berry: Birthday notifications no longer appear in the calendar

Hello again dear readers. It's time to once again open up the mailbag and clear up any BlackBerry woes you may have. Once again I'm reaching out to the CrackBerry Nation to help another puzzling issue that had my head spinning. This week's question comes from George and he writes:

Hello. So I am having a small issue with birthdays and my calendar. So I input birthdays into some contacts so they show up on my calendar as normal. But I deleted the occurrence so it wouldn't show up any more. Well now I want them back and to show up on my calendar again. But I don't see any way to do that. Even if I delete the birthday then re add it on the same contact it won't show up. If you know how to get that to happen? Any help would be appreciated I have a Bold 9900 on OS 7.1.

Thanks
George

This conversation continued over several emails. Click on the break to see what transpired!

At first I provided George with a work around after duplicating his issue on three devices in my possession (BlackBerry Bold 9700 and Torch 9800 running OS6, and a BlackBerry Bold 9900 running OS7.1).

George,

I know this must be frustrating and I was able to recreate this issue on my BlackBerry Bold 9900. While I do not have an answer as to why this occurs, I have come up with a work around that should help you with this problem and get your birthdays appearing again.

Go into your contacts application

Scroll to and click on the contact whose birthday stopped appearing and select edit

Highlight the birthday and press the menu button and then choose Delete Field

When the birthday is removed save the changes and exit out of the contact

Go back into the contact, select edit, re-enter the birthday and save your changes

If you go back into your calendar you should see them appear again as a notification. Please let me know if this works.

Regards,
Berry

However, this did not work for him. We tried seeing if the entries were set for midnight or if he had multiple calendars/emails on his device. As birthdays would be added to the default calendar I directed him towards the 101 on setting the default calendar. Then, I asked him to go into his calendar and see if "show all calendars" was selected in case the birthdays were being saved to one not being viewed. I also advised him that he could temporarily use the Tasks application for the missing birthdays as deleting the birthday field and adding it back did not work.

Unfortunately, all of his accounts appeared in the calendar and he still could not get the yearly occurrence to show up again in his calendar unless it was done manually. George had also been in contact with his service provider and BlackBerry support, and we all advised him to redo or upgrade the OS. After performing that action, a new problem popped up. Now when he adds birthdays to a new contact the notifications appear in his calendar but not when editing an existing contact.

We have had several exchanges back and forth and I could not recreate the issue or solve it. He did hear back from technical support who advised that it was an OS glitch. I searched high and low to try and find an answer as to why new contacts worked and existing contacts did not. Keep in mind this is only when entering in birthdays in the contacts application. Normally when you enter it there it automatically sets up a notification in your calendar. So now I'm asking you faithful readers to try and help a fellow CrackBerry addict with this issue and to see if it can be resolved or if it really is a software glitch!

Have a question about BlackBerry etiquette? Need advice on how to cope with your BlackBerry addiction? Dear Berry has you covered and there's no question too big or problem too small. Submit any of your BlackBerry woes by email to dearberry@crackberry.com or on Twitter @DearBerryCB.

No, there's no plan. They just push out new OSes without being tested. SMH. If only you worked for a software company, you would realize you won't find all bugs and some are discovered only after the software has released. Have you never done a Windows update? Or a MS Office update?

i have the torch 9850 great phone. however the speakerphone is useless now since the OS 7.1 update to Verizon. my speaker phone volume is so low i cannot hear anyone! my speakphone is useless! please help. i have been suffering for almost 5 months. RIM/BLACKBERRY please fix this issue. Everyone on this site is complaining about it. Verizon customers and I'm sure everywhere whoever has a torch 9850.

This may sound dumb, but go into the music player, hit the berry key, and go to Options. Check and see if Audio Boost is enabled. Even though it's in the media player, the setting has an effect elsewhere in the OS. It's worth a shot

I added the birthday in Contacts, and deleted the occurrence in the Calendar. Then, I tried to remove the birthday from the Contacts but it wouldn't give a 'Save' option. So what I did was to move the birthday one day so I could save it again. The birthday got added again to the Calendar, and the last step was to put back the real birthday date and save it. The original birthday for the contact appeared correctly in the Calendar.

I think when you delete an occurrence, it deletes the future ones, not the past ones, so maybe if you go back a year or two on your calendar you may find the original? I haven't tested this theory mainly because I don't wanna screw it up in my phone. This could explain why the 'workaround' didn't work because the test contact birthdays would be the first occurrence of the birthday, so deleting and re-adding would be okay. If the first occurrence has already passed and future occurrences have been removed, I believe at least in theory that you would have to go back to the first instance of it appearing in the calendar and make it a recurring event again.

And then there's the extreme likelihood that I have no idea what I'm talking about and you should just ignore the previous paragraph lol

Wipe, Reload, Do a selective restore for contacts, memopad, browser settings/bookmarks, options, theme settings and icon arrangement including BBM groups/contacts, and do not restore any calendar entries or settings.

Then re-setup the options, add the new entries in manually. THAT should fix the glitch up.

There is likely a ton of trash that carried over from your past devices that needs abandoning, cleaning out. ;)

Can anyone tell me how to replicate this problem? I'd love to not have the calendar alerts show up in the notifications bar, and just get a reminder on the day itself instead. Any help would be appreciated. It would be handy if Berry described how Berry was "duplicating his issue" and "recreated this issue" successfully.
Thanks

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